(Via Trademark Blog):
A new British IP blog called IPKAT, not just trade marks.

bq. This blog is run by Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon. We are IP enthusiasts from London. If you’re interested in trade marks (that’s the European/UK spelling for trademarks), patents, copyright, designs and/or any other IP topics, do keep in touch. We’d love to hear from you. We colour-code our blogs: red for copyright, teal for patents, purple for trade marks, green for confidentiality, dark blue for competition and black for everything else.

The Trademark Blog, via IPKAT (see next entry), links to the case report.

Note this Internet HTML case report: it has a ‘Neutral Citation Number’ – that is the way the case report on the Internet is referred to when it is cited.

Note also that English courts spell judgment without an E. In ordinary BE, you write judgement and judgment, just like acknowledgement or acknowledgment, but lawyers more often than not leave the E out, which brings them in line with U.S. practice. This is something the new Romain gets wrong. I’m sure it took advice, but not all lawyers know much about spelling.

The case is a good read, because of the slight distance between language and subject-matter:

bq. Ms Joachim said that Mr Thomas’ enthusiasm for the tracks by the Ant’ill Mob made it clear that he saw the inclusion of the Ant’ill Mob as crucial to the success of the album.

The Trademark Blog, via IPKAT (see next entry), links to the case report.

Note this Internet HTML case report: it has a ‘Neutral Citation Number’ – that is the way the case report on the Internet is referred to when it is cited.

Note also that English courts spell judgment without an E. In ordinary BE, you write judgement and judgment, just like acknowledgement or acknowledgment, but lawyers more often than not leave the E out, which brings them in line with U.S. practice. This is something the new Romain gets wrong. I’m sure it took advice, but not all lawyers know much about spelling.

The case is a good read, because of the slight distance between language and subject-matter:

bq. Ms Joachim said that Mr Thomas’ enthusiasm for the tracks by the Ant’ill Mob made it clear that he saw the inclusion of the Ant’ill Mob as crucial to the success of the album.

I’ve been translating some decisions of the Federal Court of Justice, or Federal Supreme Court as I am supposed to call it. The current one is VI ZR 220/01, available at RWS Verlag in German.
The plaintiff was Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, the defendant the newspaper Bild, which had used a photograph of Marlene Dietrich in a TV commercial for a contemporary history supplement.
The court held that if someone was ‘eine absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte’ (rather than a ‘relative Person der Zeitgeschichte’), the newspaper was within its rights: any image of such a person can be freely used by the press.

I don’t always fish around for terminology, but in this case I’d been given a synopsis in English, which had ‘absolute person of current history’, namely a very famous person of recent or present times.

There is an argument for a literal translation together with a definition, I suppose. For another possibility, I found an article online at Jurist by Professor Thomas Lundmark of Munster University (who writes in the journal of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristenvereinigung) on the Princess Caroline case.

Prof. Lundmark (I always thought he was German, but he’s from the U.S.A.!) is Professor of Common Law and Comparative Legal Theory at the University of Münster (!) has ‘public figures for limited purposes (relative Person der Zeitgeschichte)’ and ‘public figures for all purposes (absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte)’. This is very nice. The only query I have is that the element of history is lost. But here I am making the mistake of not going back to the German definition. Perhaps ‘figures of contemporary history for all purposes’. Continue reading →

I’ve been translating some decisions of the Federal Court of Justice, or Federal Supreme Court as I am supposed to call it. The current one is VI ZR 220/01, available at RWS Verlag in German.
The plaintiff was Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, the defendant the newspaper Bild, which had used a photograph of Marlene Dietrich in a TV commercial for a contemporary history supplement.
The court held that if someone was ‘eine absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte’ (rather than a ‘relative Person der Zeitgeschichte’), the newspaper was within its rights: any image of such a person can be freely used by the press.

I don’t always fish around for terminology, but in this case I’d been given a synopsis in English, which had ‘absolute person of current history’, namely a very famous person of recent or present times.

There is an argument for a literal translation together with a definition, I suppose. For another possibility, I found an article online at Jurist by Professor Thomas Lundmark of Munster University (who writes in the journal of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristenvereinigung) on the Princess Caroline case.

Prof. Lundmark (I always thought he was German, but he’s from the U.S.A.!) is Professor of Common Law and Comparative Legal Theory at the University of Münster (!) has ‘public figures for limited purposes (relative Person der Zeitgeschichte)’ and ‘public figures for all purposes (absolute Person der Zeitgeschichte)’. This is very nice. The only query I have is that the element of history is lost. But here I am making the mistake of not going back to the German definition. Perhaps ‘figures of contemporary history for all purposes’. Continue reading →

Via The Legal Reader (formerly WeirdOfTheNews), the New Yorker has an article on email indiscretions committed by law-firm interns. Jonas Blank’s indiscretion at Skadden Arps is slightly old news, but there are other examples in the article too.

The New York Law Journal has an agony aunt for summer associates. Continue reading →